When the British botanist Joseph Paxton drew up the plans for the Crystal Palace in 1850, he was not merely seeking to apply his knowledge of horticultural greenhouses to the design of a building capable of housing the first of the world’s fairs.1 From the simplicity of its architecture, the ease of its construction, and the monumental savings it made possible for a structure of such scale, the idea was to create more than just a house for a landmark event. Beyond the exhibition, Paxton envisioned to create a new type of urban environment—an immense indoor garden conceived as a new form of public space, offering the population a comfortable climate, healthy air, and pleasant light, sheltered from the bad weather and pollution that plagued London during the height of the Industrial Revolution.2
In “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” the Austrian architectural historian Henrik Schoenefeldt demonstrates how Paxton’s project formed part of a broader movement that sought to use the horticultural greenhouse as a model of architecture for urban populations:
A wide range of horticulturists, surgeons, social and health reformers contemplated applying the technical and environmental reasoning behind the horticultural glasshouse to the design of the built environment in general, with the intention of using glasshouses as a means of improving people’s health in major industrial cities.3
Regarding the Crystal Palace itself, Schoenefeldt refers to the work of the British physician Francis S. Haden, who saw the building as an urban model to be followed in order to promote public health.4 Based on these principles, even before its construction, Paxton argued that the building should remain in place after the exhibition. And knowing that it would probably become way too hot inside during the sunniest summer days, he suggested that the entire east and west facades could be temporarily removed in order to encourage air circulation and create a seamless continuity between the interior and exterior.5 For him, the Crystal Palace could thus become a kind of intermediate space between city and park, whose activation would depend on the season: closed in autumn, winter, and spring, but open during the summer.6
From this environmental and climatic perspective, it is worth noting the diligence with which temperature was recorded during the entire exhibition and published intermittently in the Illustrated London News, The Times, and The Gardeners’ Chronicle. While these measurements provide a fairly clear picture of the building’s overall behavior during the event, they are not sufficient to fully model its thermal behavior.7 However, based on this data, Schoenefeldt highlights the fact that as summer temperatures made conditions inside the building rapidly unbearable, Paxton’s idea to remove the glass walls forming the east and west facades was put into practice between July 2 and July 19, 1851.8
This historical episode led us to imagine a relatively simple experiment: Through computational modeling, would it be possible to assess the impact that this opening of the walls can have on the interior temperatures of a greenhouse of this scale?
We modeled the Crystal Palace as it was originally designed (Hyde Park, 1851), based on archival documents available online.9 The structural grid measures 7.42 by 7.42 meters, the ground-floor area is 74,221 m², and the total volume of the building is 1 million m³. The largest facades of the Crystal Palace face north and south. Due to the lack of sufficiently precise documentation regarding the positioning of shading devices used at the time, and the difficulty of accurately assessing the impact of vegetation, these elements were not included in the model.10 While Schoenefeldt’s work consisted in compiling historical measurements taken during the exhibition, the weather data used for the thermal simulation represented the period separating us today from the first oil crisis (1973–2023).11
The thermal simulation of the Crystal Palace was conducted according to the following assumptions:
Thermal resistance (R-values) of envelope components12
External walls: 1.136 m²·K/W
Roof: 0.028 m²·K/W
Floor: 0.311 m²·K/W
Windows: 0.005 m²·K/W
Infiltration: 0.0006 m³/s per m² of facade
The building is considered under inert conditions: no occupants, no technical systems, no heating, no cooling, no operable windows. And its climate was simulated under two scenarios:
1. Fully enclosed
2. Open on the east and west facades
The results show that, although removing the east and west facades falls short of meeting current thermal comfort standards, its impact is enormous. While the building’s structural system made such an intervention relatively feasible, it nonetheless required an extraordinary amount of labor, logistics, and storage capacity. In this respect, what was possible for the first World’s Fair in 1851 cannot be generalized as a principle for contemporary glass buildings. However, if we continue to view the Crystal Palace as an emblematic building of modernity, this episode introduces a significant shift in its interpretation and appreciation.
In its fully enclosed configuration, the Crystal Palace serves as a spatial metaphor for a world subjected to the anthropogenic acceleration of the greenhouse effect. But its opening during the hottest summer days of the exhibition shows that it also worked, in practical terms, as a porous building. Closer to the more common contemporary greenhouses than to the transparent yet hermetic monument described by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Marshall Berman, or Peter Sloterdijk, these ideas reflect a climatic imagination in Paxton’s thinking that diverged from the modern ideal of separation.13
All of the solutions implemented in the Crystal Palace to regulate temperature, light, and ventilation were passive.14 In this respect, opening the east and west facades was not only the most radical, but also the most simple of these solutions.15 Yet the rapid development of energetic machines such as heating, ventilation, and air-conditioning systems ultimately pushed Paxton, in subsequent projects, toward solving the extreme heat conditions that the Crystal Palace faced during the summer in very different ways. His design for an exercise hall at the London Chest Hospital near Victoria Park (1851), and his later winter garden projects, trade porosity for increased imperviousness. His greenhouses became increasingly sealed structures, whose interior environment would be entirely regulated and controlled by machines.
We can, of course, continue to look at this iconic building as the main precedent of an architecture that looks to condition buildings without reliance on the thermal inertia of thick facades, and increasingly delegates environmental and climatic issues to mechanical systems that, reliant on fossil fuels, unleash exponential carbon emissions.16 But the Crystal Palace’s detailed history shows that it also stands for the possibility of a more open architecture. Today, building standards increasingly insist on insulation, which in many cases is not a bad idea. But the more hermetic buildings are, the more dependent on energetic machines they remain. The Crystal Palace remains a diagrammatic model, but one that speaks more about porosity and passive architectural strategies than about the purely mechanical interiorization ideal of modernity.
The Crystal Palace was built in the spring of 1851 in Hyde Park, in central London. It housed the first of the great World’s Fairs from May to October of that same year, before being dismantled and reassembled—on a larger scale and with more ornaments—on the outskirts of the capital, at Sydenham Hill. The building was destroyed in a massive fire in 1936.
Joseph Paxton, What Is to Become of the Crystal Palace? (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1851).
Henrik Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” Architectural Research Quarterly 12, nos. 3–4 (2008): 283–84.
Francis S. Haden, A Medical Man’s Plea for a Winter Garden in the Crystal Palace (London: John van Voorst, 1851).
Paxton first presented his intention to transform the Crystal Palace into a permanent public winter garden as early as the first public presentation of his project in the Illustrated London News (July 6, 1850, 6). These intentions were further elaborated in an interview published in The Times (July 28, 1851, 6). See also Paxton, What Is to Become of the Crystal Palace?, 1851.
This principle is close to the way Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal approach the use and adaptation of horticultural greenhouses in their architectural projects. See, notably, Anne Lacaton and Jean-Philippe Vassal, eds., It’s Nice Today: On Climate, Comfort, and Pleasure (Ruby Press, 2025).
While we know that the mechanical ventilation system, operated by the Royal Sappers and Miners, required them to monitor the temperature inside the building using 14 thermometers positioned throughout the building, which they read every two hours, we do not currently have the details of these readings. See First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851 (London: Her Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1852), 67.
First Report of the Commissioners for the Exhibition of 1851. From July 7 onwards, some of the glass panels covering the north and south facades were also removed. All of these facades were reinstalled once the internal temperature had dropped to around 15 °C by the time the building was opened, around July 19. This event was notably reported at the time in The Times. See in particular The Times, June 27, 1856, 5; The Times, July 1, 1851, 5; and The Times, September 16, 1851, 5.
Our model is fully detailed and available here: ➝.
This decision does not mean, of course, that we don’t consider these elements to be important factors in the thermal behavior of the building. It simply reflects the fact that we preferred to exclude variables that we could not model with sufficient precision. In this sense our model is incomplete. But it is rigorous in its attempt to compare two states that are independent from these elements. It is also fully open sourced, and, as such, could be refined by anyone having clear information about them and the ability to carefully model their role.
The data corresponds to the London St. James’s Park weather station, located three kilometers from the original Crystal Palace site. See ➝.
R is the symbol for the thermal resistance of a given material. In any given case, it depends on its thickness, mass, density, and thermal conductivity. It is expressed in m²·K/W.
See Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (Vintage Classics, 1994); Nikolay Chernyshevsky, What Is to Be Done?, revised ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1989); Marshall Berman, All What Is Solid Melts Into Air: The Experience of Modernity, 2nd ed. (London and New York: Verso, 2010); and Peter Sloterdijk, In the World Interior of Capital (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). From the very first presentation of the project, Paxton envisaged protecting the facades and cooling the interior of the building by using thick damp curtains: “The draught can be regulated by the use of a thick piece of open fabric which, when kept damp in hot weather, would make the interior of the building much cooler than the outside atmosphere.” Illustrated London News, July 6, 1850, 13.
Other solutions included vegetation and shading systems. Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” 286.
Whilst the installation of the east and west facades is, once again, no simple task, the fact that this proposal was arrived at after initially considering the development of shading systems for these facades clearly reflects a simplification of the planned approach. Schoenefeldt, “The Crystal Palace, Environmentally Considered,” 287.
In this sense, the Crystal Palace may be seen as the main precedent in the development of what Reyner Banham called a regenerative mode of construction, in which he saw the main driving force of architectural modernity. See Reyner Banham, The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment (London: The Architectural Press, 1969).
